This Rupert Holmes one-hit-wonder topped the charts as 1979 closed. The lyrics capture the drastic societal change that took place during the turbulent two decades since Patti Page's 1957 paeon to Old Cape Cod's "church bells chimin' on a Sunday morn."

Both tunes have combined to secure the popular image of Cape Cod as a beautiful paradise.

But in the words of Provincetown Police Detective Meredith Lobur: "Beautiful places are not immune to brutal crime."

Yesterday was the 39th anniversary of our most infamous unsolved murder, a cold case known locally as "The Lady of the Dunes." Detective Lobur is still investigating.

Someone kind recently placed flowers on the grave of “The Lady of the
Dunes,”

marked on the headstone as “Unidentified Female Body.”

On the morning of July 26, 1974, a young girl walking her
dog on the dunes found a woman’s naked and desecrated corpse lying face down on
a towel with her clothes folded near her head.

Her hands had been cut off and her wrists shoved into the
sand as if she were doing push-ups.

The left side of her skull was crushed, her head nearly
decapitated and several teeth ripped out.

In 2000, DNA was taken with no result.

I’m told by someone who knows that investigators recently
took yet another sample – quietly, so as not to rouse notice.

It’s striking how important DNA has become in re-opening
cold cases. For example, the “Boston Strangler” case.

Albert DeSalvo, the “Boston Strangler”

Albert DeSalvo confessed to killing 11 women in the Boston area between
1962 and 1964. (He was later killed in prison.)

Police had always doubted DeSalvo’s confession to the rape and murder
of Mary Sullivan, thought to have been his last victim. But this month, they used new
DNA technology to conclusively link him to Mary’s murder.

Mary Sullivan had moved from Cape Cod to Boston days before her slaying. And here on Cape Cod, "The Lady of the Dunes" continues to haunt. As does this police composite of how "The Lady" might have looked:

Here’s how I dealt with all this in my forthcoming novel, Cold Stun:

“Things here are a little weird sometimes,” Steve said.

“Like what?” Jenny asked.

“Like sometimes women are murdered here. And the cops never solve the murders. There’s all these ‘open’ murder cases around here.”

“Except Chop-Chop,” Billy corrected. “They got Chop-Chop.”

“Who the hell is Chop-Chop?” Jenny asked.

“It was a long time ago,” Billy said. “Nineteen sixty-eight. The ‘Summer of Love.’ That’s how I remember the year. He was a pothead. Had a marijuana patch in his back yard. He killed two girls and cut them up and buried the parts behind his Mary Jane garden. That’s why they called him Chop-Chop.”

“That’s what I mean about weird,” Steve said. “Tell her about The Lady of the Dunes, Billy.”

“That one’s been open for what, twenty, thirty years?” Billy said. He turned to Jenny. “This one happened next door, in Provincetown. They find a woman out in the dunes on the ocean side. Her hands are missing. Her head’s dangling off. The cops do a search of dental records. Nothing. They call her ‘The Lady of the Dunes.’ Still open.”

“Seems that all the open cases happen to involve women,” Steve said. “A woman in Bourne stabbed to death in her bathtub. A teacher beaten to death in the woods in Mashpee. Another woman shot in the head in a parking lot in Provincetown. These were professional people, you know? Not hookers or druggies.”

“Hell,” Danny said, “just last year a woman in her twenties goes for a job interview and disappears. Two months later they dig up her body from a beach in Sandwich.”

Saturday, July 20, 2013

In her memoir, Paris
France, Gertrude Stein claimed: “Writers have two countries. The one where
they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic.
It is not real but it is really there.”

I’d say this is true for not only writers, but for all of us
as we approach each new day.

We have a romanticized anticipation in our mind’s eye of how
we want things to unfold. But something as simple – or savage – as weather can wrench
us back to the real.

Here in my Vieques paradise
last week, whatever romantic plans islanders had were brought up short by
warnings of the imminent arrival of Tropical Storm Chantal.

The usual preparations got
under way. We stowed the outdoor furniture … filled bottles with drinking water
and buckets with flushing water … queued up in long lines at the island’s two
gas stations (which are across the street from each other).

Leonard Bernstein was talking about Puerto Rico when he wrote TheWest Side Story lyrics, “ … always the hurricanes blowing.”

The Spanish word for
hurricane is tormenta.

Anyone who says they're not
afraid of a hurricane is either a fool or a liar, or a little bit of both, says
Anderson Cooper.

This is why, when I built
my Casa Cascadas bed-and-breakfast on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, I commissioned Architect John
Hix.

John’s been a presence in
Vieques for more than two decades and has learned to keep his eye on the real,
even as he designs the magnificent and the minimalist.

So he builds houses that
are completely concrete and without glass, with steel doors that roll down to
envelop occupants against what Rudyard Kipling called “crazy-eyed hurricanes.”

Casa Cascadas, Vieques, Puerto Rico

Taking the vagaries of weather into account – and having a
“weather plan” in place – also is a principle of event planning.

In my days of planning
events for corporations that ranged from Hitachi and Humana to IBM and Siemens,
I grappled with a good share of bad weather.

For example:

The annual Christmas parties I produced for IBM employees unfailingly
fell on the day of the winter’s first major snowstorm.

Recognition events I put on for Siemens’ top performers
seemed cursed: four days of rain
during an event in Palm Beach … rain in the desert during an event in
Scottsdale … a snow storm that delayed travelers to an event in the Florida keys.

At IBM, I witnessed 10 inches of rain on what we referred to
as “turnover day” -- 1,000 employees trying to depart New Orleans after the
first of two back-to-back recognition event sessions as another 1,000 tried to
fly in for the second.

There is a life lesson to be learned from all this -- which
explains the counter-intuitive action naval captains take when they leave the
supposed safety of port for the open sea in anticipation of a hurricane.

To quote the nineteenth-century British cleric and aphorist, Charles Caleb Colton: “The sailor that foresees
a hurricane stands out to sea and encounters a storm in order to avoid a shipwreck.”

Martin Luther could have had Vieques in mind when he
commented, “The dog would be much
esteemed were it not so common.”

Puerto Ricans do not esteem dogs. In fact, they’ll tell you
the dogs to whom they feed scraps aren’t theirs. The dogs are never allowed
indoors … they aren’t neutered … they never visit a vet.

As a result, their average life span can be as brief as two
years.

In Disney’s 1955 classic, Lady and the Tramp, the foot-loose and collar-free Tramp expounds on
his lifestyle: “One family for every day
of the week. The point is, none of them have me.”

The Viequense word
for the feral dogs is sato. Although
they are mixed-breed, satos share a
look – short in the leg, long in the body, big-eared and a bit bug-eyed.

If there are an estimated 9,000+ human residents on Vieques,
the pooch population is two, three, four, five times that number. We’ll never
get an accurate count because the population changes hourly.

Take Angel, for example, the Puerto Rican guy down the road
from me. He started with a single male that had a lot of Labrador in his
background. A female sato came around
and stayed for the scraps – and the love. Within the past six months she and
the Lab have spawned two litters – six new puppies in all.

North Americans who live here can’t
get enough of the satos. Alex and
Glen keep three, as does Dorothy. Beverly has a brace. Dottie has about 10 and Ingrid
might have 20 at any given time.

North Americans adopt satos
and treat them like their children – down to inviting them to sleep in their
beds. There is only one part-time vet here, so it’s not uncommon for North
Americans to fly with their dogs to the main island of Puerto Rico for
veterinary care.

North Americans who own rescued satos say these dogs are intelligent and loyal beyond belief
because they seem to comprehend that their new owners have taken them off the
street.

Which testifies to Mark Twain’s claim that, “If you pick up a starving dog and make him
prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a
dog and man.”

Who’s to say what the dogs themselves think about it all?
Disney took a crack at it:

Lady: It's morning.

Tramp: Yeah. So it is.

Lady: I should have
been home hours ago.

Tramp: Why? Because
you still believe in that “ faithful old dog" routine? Aw, come on, Pidge.
Open your eyes.

Lady: Open my eyes?

Tramp: To what a dog's
life can really be! I'll show you what I mean. Look down there. Tell me what
you see.

Lady: Well, I see nice
homes, with yards and fences ...

Tramp: Exactly. Life
on a leash. Look again, Pige. Look, there's a great big hunk of world down
there, with no fence around it. Where two dogs can find adventure and
excitement. And beyond those distant hills, who knows what wonderful
experiences? And it's all ours for the taking, Pige. It's all ours.

Saturday, July 6, 2013

My daughter once won the annual children’s Halloween
window-painting contest sponsored by Main Street merchants in our town of
Ridgefield, CT. What made hers such a stellar achievement was that the shopkeepers
prohibited the kids from using black paint lest their windows crack from the
sunlight absorbed by black.

Think about it. Halloween – a candy-crammed orgy of orange
and black -- without the black.About the same time my daughter was trying to figure out how to paint without black, I was trying to figure out how to do my job at IBM – “Big Blue” as the company is often called because of its distinctive blue logo -- without using the color red.

Our CEO hated the color. His standing order: “No red!” He
had banished one of the primary colors.

At that time, IBM had many divisions, operating units and
subsidiary corporations, and most conducted annual recognition events for top
performers. The aim was to motivate the sales force while giving executives the
chance to size up high-potential performers in a one-on-one environment away
from the office.

I was responsible for creating our unit’s event – a mix of
morning business meetings, afternoon recreational activities and evening social
functions.

The staff worked for most of the year leading up to the
event to create sophisticated business theater -- identifying and directing
outside speakers, producing sophisticated multi-image video programs and pyrotechnics,
and writing theme, continuity and speech material.

Except -- no red. No red type. No red on slides or graphics
or sets. Not even the gels used on the stage lights could be any shade of red.

Red is unique in that it can attract or repel, elevate or
enrage.

In many of the world’s cultures, red has positive
connotations – good luck in China and India, beauty in Russia.

In her novel, Pretty
Face, Mary Hogan couldn’t have treated the color better: “Red is the color of
life. It's blood, passion, rage. It's menstrual flow and after birth.
Beginnings and violent end. Red is the color of love. Beating hearts and hungry
lips. Roses, Valentines, cherries. Red is the color of shame. Crimson cheeks
and spilled blood. Broken hearts, opened veins. A burning desire to return to
white.”

Who knows what it was about red that set off our CEO?

We didn’t push back at him too much, even though he inserted
himself into our field of expertise. After all, he was the one on stage, the
host of the party. It was his brand.

And he knew it. That’s why he periodically reminded those of
us responsible for producing the lavish events of that big-budget era: “If you know so much, why aren’t you working
in Hollywood and making six figures?”